But now, on this warm May night, he put painful thoughts away, and determined to extract the greatest possible enjoyment from what could only be, alas! the fleeting present.
Treading over the grass as lightly as might be, he leaped across the narrow gravel footpath which ran round the front of the house.
And then a most untoward thing happened! Unaware that Lucy had unlatched the hasp of the long French window, Guy Cheale leaned against it, panting, and fell forward into the room—his heavy boot crashing through one of the lower panes.
He uttered a stifled oath, then stood up and, walking forward, felt in the darkness for the terror-stricken girl. For a few minutes they stood together listening intently; then, reassured, he led her over to a couch and, throwing himself down on it, he clasped her to him closely.
His arms were round her, he was kissing her eagerly, thirstily, when all at once she gave a stifled cry—she had heard the handle turn in the locked door.
“I expect it’s Miss Cheale,” she whispered. “She taxed me the other night with having a sweetheart I was ashamed of! Go away—quick! She’ll get round to the window in a minute——”
Guy Cheale leaped up and rushed across the room. Desperately he tried to find the awkward, old-fashioned catch, and just as the second door of the drawing room—a door the existence of which Lucy had forgotten—was unlatched, and the electric light switched on, he flung open the window and disappeared into the dark garden.
But the figure which advanced slowly into the L-shaped room was not that of Agatha Cheale. Lucy, petrified with shame and fear, knew it for that of the invalid mistress of the Thatched House.
Clad in an old-fashioned white dressing gown, her pallid face filled with mingled curiosity and fright, Mrs. Garlett looked like a wraith, and far more willingly would the girl, who stood before her with hanging head, have faced a real spirit.
For a long, breathless moment Mrs. Garlett, dazzled by the light, peered round her, looking this way and that. Then, “Lucy!” she exclaimed, in a tone of keen surprise and anger, and again, “Lucy?”